Flightboard: Room Availability on the Big Screen

04.14.2016 |
Teem

We’ve all been there: You’re walking around the office poking your head in conference rooms to find one that’s available. The EventBoard displays outside each room help by allowing you to view the schedule for a room within arm’s reach. But what about when you’re not by a display? We thought, “There must be a better way to share general meeting room status.”

Introducing Flightboard. Inspired by the monitors in the airport, Flightboard shows the current and upcoming status of your company’s meeting rooms at a glance.

You can set up Flightboard to filter by campus, building or floor. We suggest placing it on a monitor in a central place on each floor, for everyone to reference.

If you have more rooms than fit on the screen, it will slowly scroll on a loop.

How Your Employees Can Use Flightboard

There are two primary use cases:

Your employees are running to their next meeting and forget which room to go to. They can take a look at the Flightboard.

They want to find an available room right now. With Flightboard they can find an open room, then book an ad-hoc meeting from the EventBoard display when they get to the room.

Flightboard is available to all EventBoard plan levels and users. Any of your employees can log in to their EventBoard account and launch Flightboard from the menu to view while still at their desk.

Here’s how they’d navigate to Flightboard from within the EventBoard account:

Flightboard Is a View-Only Feature … For a Reason

You can’t create meetings or edit them from Flightboard. Why not? That’s everyone’s first question.

Here’s why: If Flightboard were available as a stand-alone booking tool, you would stop seeing tablets outside of each room. And once that happened, there’d be side effects.

For instance, without the display, you wouldn’t be able to check in to events:

Without the check-in feature, EventBoard can’t free up rooms when no one shows up for the meeting. The room would appear to be occupied, even if it wasn’t. And freeing up rooms is one of EventBoard’s most valuable functions.

The check-in feature collects valuable data to fuel reports and analytics that will help you improve meeting behavior and space usage.

If the displays were no longer outside each meeting room, our customers would also stop benefitting from what we like to call the “traffic cop” effect. The display provides transparency about when it’s time to give up the room for the next meeting. It encourages accountability. Without it, your company’s CEO can just keep squatting in the room that you reserved.

Finally, if people could book meetings from the Flightboard monitor, at larger companies lines would form at the Flightboards as people waited for their turn to book a meeting. That would get in the way of doing business. And we are in the business of getting out of the way.